I came to these photos by way of the late Allan Girdler, former editor in chief of Cycle World, who sent me a DVD full of images he’d collected over the years. This is an AMA Battle of the Twins factory Harley featuring a DKG chassis. Road racer Dave Garoutte ran a Bay Area fabrication company DKG and Dave happened to work a lot with Mert Lawwill and it’s through that association that Dave was given the task of building a Battle of the Twins racer. Dave takes over the story of the bike on his website dkg-cnc.com.

This was another Mert Lawwill project, in this case for the Harley-Davidson race team. I was given a free hand to build a HD 1000 based road racer for the AMA Battle of the Twins professional race series. The bike was ‘raced’ by Jay Springsteen in 19– at Daytona Motor Speedway in Florida. I named it the Land Shark, but HD didn’t like it.

The chassis was built around an XR750 dirt-track engine which was used for the initial testing. When it was finished, I rode the bike around the block once, then crated it up for shipping to Daytona for the test. Jay and Gene Church were there to try the bike out as well as the current factory bike; “Lucifer’s Hammer’. I took the first couple of laps on the Land Shark to make sure it wasn’t going to pitch anyone down the road.

After the test, Gene decided to race the old bike and Jay decided he liked mine better.

When we got back to the shop, we were given an old 1000cc motor to mount and finish fitting for the race. New pipes, shifter, oil tank and carburetors were made or mounted.

Then off to Daytona again where the fiasco began. For most of speed week we were having oiling problems that turned out to be caused by the worn out engine. Jay would go out for a test session and come in at the end of the second lap with oil all over the bike. Incredibly, even with oil on his back tire, his lap times were within a second of the times that eventually won the race. On the day before the qualifying race, the the motor toasted a connecting rod and we spent all night rebuilding the motor. That was when we realized how worn out it was. The piston had smacked the head when the rod bearing went, crushing the lands onto the rings, and I had to spend two hours carefully removing the old rings because they didn’t even have new rings for us to use! Meanwhile, Mert was busy rebuilding the crankshaft.

Things were looking good for the next day when Jay went out for the warmup lap of the qualifying race. Much to our dismay, he coasted into the pits with a broken transmission. Race over before it began!

This ended my involvement with the bike and I don’t think they ever raced it again, possibly because of internal politics??

Some features: Magnesium triple clamps. Oversized upside-down forks (modified motocross forks and as far as I know, the first use of upside down forks on a road racer). Oversized direct-path frame tubes. Outrigger aluminum swingarm with spherical roller bearing pivots. Short ( 55″) wheelbase. Weight appx. 280 lbs (this was 40 lb. lighter than ‘Lucifer’s Hammer’, the official Harley entry ridden by Gene Church). Anti-dive front brakes. Under slung oil tank.